Final Frontier

Just after midnight on Wednesday, in southern Kazakhstan—early this afternoon, Eastern time—the communications satellite Echostar XVI took off from pad 39, Site 200, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. A spacecraft leased to the Dish Network and headed for an orbit some twenty-two thousand miles above the earth, Echostar XVI piggybacked a Proton Breeze M rocket, but that wasn’t the only piggybacking going on. Keen-eyed observers watching the launch at Baikonur (or online, via live stream, as I did) might have noticed a small, incongruous form affixed barnacle-like to the satellite. It was a gold-plated aluminum cannister containing a miniscule silicon wafer imprinted with a hundred images: a piece by the artist Trevor Paglen, who decided several years ago to mount an exhibit, of sorts, entitled “The Last Pictures,” in outer space.

Most of Paglen’s art work, which I wrote about in the magazine a few weeks ago, is about secrecy. His big subject is the so-called black world of classified defense activity, and, over the years, he has filled gallery walls with lists of Pentagon code names; made short films out of grainy video feeds intercepted from surveillance drones; and mounted oversize photographs depicting secret military installations, shot from great distances. Several years ago, while photographing spy satellites in the night sky, Paglen learned that most communications satellites hurtle around in what is known as geostationary orbit. Unlike satellites at lower or higher altitudes, which eventually plummet to earth or drift off, geostationary spacecraft will remain in place until the sun consumes the earth. This orbital junk yard will constitute the final remnants of human civilization on the planet, and Paglen’s idea was, as I wrote, to make “a project that would be to these relics what bison paintings were to the Lascaux caves.” It is common to hear people in the arts say something to the effect of, “If this work reaches just one person, it will be worth it.” With the “The Last Pictures,” which is intended, ostensibly, anyway, for some imaginary, profoundly unknowable future audience, the bromide needs some adjusting: “If this work reaches just one alien…”

Paglen—who completed “The Last Pictures” with the assistance of the public-art organization Creative Time, M.I.T., and a host of researchers, scientists, and philosophers—was inspired in part by the Pioneer Plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, audio-visual mementos of life on earth that NASA, working with Carl Sagan, had attached to deep-space probes in the seventies, on the chance that smart aliens with eyes and ears might discover them. But whereas those gestures had been optimistic (you might say quixotic), Paglen wanted his to be morose: a gravestone rather than an olive branch, or as he put it, “More Stanislaw Lem than Buzz Aldrin.” Paglen engraved his cannister’s cover with a 2012 map of pulsars, which can be used, in theory, to date the object, but other elements of the work tweak such notions of universal communication, like an image Paglen included of a dictionary of Volapük, a would-be lingua franca that temporarily rivalled Esperanto. In the magazine, I wrote that

Viewed end to end, the hundred photographs—a mushroom cloud, an industrial chicken farm, Trotsky’s brain—form a sombre chronicle of modern human history. Paglen sees “The Last Pictures” as pushing forward the same underlying concerns as his secrecy pictures: the limits of visual communication, the annexation of space.

At an event to publicize “The Last Pictures” in September, at Bryant Park, the filmmaker Werner Herzog—who has made movies about both aliens and cave paintings—interviewed Paglen about the project, and both men agreed that its nominal goal was ridiculous. The work’s true function was to be a mirror: “We’re talking to ourselves when we talk about aliens,” Herzog said. (Referring to an image of Japanese children grinning in a nineteen-forties internment camp that Paglen had included in the cannister, Herzog added, in the conversation’s Herzoggiest moment, “The universe knows no smiles—it is hostile and ugly.”)

One morning last spring, I joined Paglen on the M.I.T. campus, where he had an artist’s residency, and where he and a graduate student named Adam McCaughan would spend the next several hours fashioning a dozen silicon wafers. The actual space-bound artifact had already been affixed to Echostar XVI (Creative Time had finagled permission from the satellite’s parent company, Echostar); Paglen was at M.I.T. to make duplicate wafers that he could exhibit and perhaps sell to collectors. (“I’ve got to figure out how to actually make some money with this thing,” he told me later that day.)

We walked from McCaughan’s office to M.I.T.’s nanostructures laboratory, a “clean room” with only about a hundred particles per cubic foot of air. Before entering, we had to don hooded white “bunny suits,” plastic goggles, and latex gloves. I was free to take notes using my phone, but I had to check my spiral notebook, with its copious paper fibres, at the door. “Welcome to the cleanest air you’ve ever breathed,” McCaughan said. The lab was, in effect, a high-tech darkroom. The overhead lights were yellow, to avoid unwanted exposures, most horizontal surfaces were perforated, and ventilation grates lined the floor, sucking the air.

McCaughan began the wafer-making process by coating each wafer in a chemical “resist,” affixing it to a metal master containing Paglen’s images, and exposing these on to the wafer with a concentrated flood of ultraviolet light. It took about forty-five minutes for the first wafer to be complete, and there was something poignant about how delicate it looked. Half a millimetre thick and two inches in diameter, the wafer could easily fit in one’s palm. Paglen photographed it, and McCaughan went off to prep the next batch of wafers.

While these were cooking, Paglen nudged me and raised his eyebrows behind his goggles, tilting his head to indicate a complicated-looking instrument on a shelf nearby. It was a spectroscopic ellipsometer, which is used to perform extremely sensitive measurements. Paglen had noticed a white sticker on the ellipsometer’s base, which read, “PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT.” Earlier, McCaughan had mentioned that many of his classmates were destined for jobs at DARPA, the Pentagon’s scientific-research wing—even in the clean room, it turned out, in the midst of preparations for “The Last Pictures,” the black world wasn’t far away. “This place is a giant weapons lab,” Paglen murmured, “if you haven’t figured it out yet.”